Wednesday, November 26, 2014

New Research: Fleet Command





Fleet points define how big your fleet can be without costing any upkeep.
You start with 25 fleet command points. Each ship uses as many points as it has places for ship modules (scout 5, corvette 7 …).
The new researches give you additional command points, but reduce your overall productivity.
If your fleet uses more command points than available (25 + fleet command research), upkeep costs will occur. Upkeep does also lower the productivity of the colonies.
The ship list shows the current values:







The formula for the upkeep is:

( shipPoints – commandPoints ) / commandPoints

and the result is capped to a value between 0 and 1.
Here is an example:

6 scouts = 30 ship points
Base command points and no research = 25 command points

(30 – 25) / 25 = 0.2 => 20% Upkeep

Which would mean a loss of 20% on each produced good.
Aside from the upkeep constraint, empires can't build more ships than twice their command points.

Some benefits of the new feature:
  • Since fleet size is restricted, fleet quality becomes very interesting. The strongest spaceships are built of ship modules made of special resources. Since each region does yield only one of the five special resources, most empires will have access to only one or two types. Trading with other players will get you these resources (or ship modules made of these).
  • Everyone has to live with the fleet command constraint, and those who handle it best will have an advantage
  • When empires build huge fleets during a conflict, their economy will take harm
  • Wars won't be fought in a day anymore. During conflicts, the previously accumulated goods will be spent over multiple days, perhaps even weeks.
This new feature will not be merged in the currently running game or demos, but the next game will include it.
If you think the implementation should be simpler / more complex / completely different - just specify it in a comment, and I will take it into account and possibly change the implementation.









Monday, November 17, 2014

Progress on the new game server

The progress is slow, but at least steady.
The new game server is in its final testing stage. As soon as that is done, new features will be added to the game.
The whole server thing means a huge change in game architecture. But this new version will be more suitable to serve hundreds of players simultaneously.

The current game does not implement this technique - it does distinguish from the previous alpha game in map size an the newly added colony limit.